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What is the importance of character development in literature
Diversity narrative essay
Diversity narrative essay
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The book “Maniac Magee” by Jerry Spinelli connects with the song “Colorblind.” by the Counting Crows by how Maniac does not care about skin color, how he doesn’t open up to people who want to help him, and how he is tongue -tied about the racial issues in Two Mills. First, the book connects to the song in the line “I am colorblind/Coffee black and egg white” (Counting Crows 1-2). Maniac does not care about the skin color of people. In Two Mills, the light-colored people and dark-colored people quite literally have a line drawn between them; the railroad. “He {Grayson} abruptly said, ‘Them black people, they eat mashed potatoes too?’ Maniac thought he was kidding, but realized he wasn’t.” (Spinelli 87). He goes from the East and West sides of Two Mills and makes friends …show more content…
Maniac is caught in the middle of the feud between the East and West sides, but he can't really do anything about it. “‘Whitey.’ And it surprised him that he knew. He just stood there, blinking through the water- drop sun blur, the hydrant gusher smacking his thin, bare ankles. The radios, the people, were silent. ‘You move on now, Whitey,’ the man said. ‘You pick up your gear and move on out. Time to go home now.’ The man was close enough to be catching some water around his shoes, which, Maniac noticed, were actually slippers. His pants were baggy, and his shirt wasn't really a shirt but a pajama top covered with high-tailed roosters. White hair curled around his ears. Maniac gave his answer. ‘I am home.’ The man took a step closer, dropped his arm. ‘You go on home now, son. Back to your own kind. I seen ya at the block party. Now you get goin'.’” (Spinelli 61). He is “Taffy stuck and tongue tied/Stutter shook and uptight” (Counting Crows 5-6) about all of the racial issues with the East and West
Before Litwack even begins telling black southerners’ stories, he gives a set of lyrics to the reader. With a little research, the reader can listen to the song, “Trouble in Mind.” This song
...ial bland, white, powerless male; nothing is present that distinguishes Mr. Williams from the rest of the seemingly dominant white society. Roman, on the other hand, despite the fact that he lives in poverty, possesses more liveliness and power than Mr. Williams could ever possess. For instance, Roman shows up to take the CAT wearing his “red, yellow, white, and blue grass-dance outfit” because Roman’s grandmother “told [him Mr. William’s] test was culturally biased and that [he] might need a little extra power to do [his] best.” Unlike Mr. Williams, Roman recognizes the power that color possesses, even after death, for Roman vividly remembers “the yellow headlights of the red truck that smashed head-on into his father’s blue Chevy,” his mother’s “red blood coughed into the folds of a white handkerchief,” and the fact that his mother “was buried in a purple dress.”
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" a pair of brothers try to make sense of the urban decay that surrounds and fills them. This quest to puzzle out the truth of the shadows within their hearts and on the streets takes on a great importance. Baldwin meets his audience at a halfway mark: Sonny has already fallen into drug use, and is now trying to return to a clean life with his brother's aid. The narrator must first attempt to understand and make peace with his brother's drug use before he can extend his help and heart to him. Sonny and his brother both struggle for acceptance. Sonny wants desperately to explain himself while also trying to stay afloat and out of drugs. Baldwin amplifies these struggles with a continuous symbolic motif of light and darkness. Throughout "Sonny's Blues" there is a pervasive sense of darkness which represents the reality of life on the streets of Harlem. The darkness is sometimes good but usually sobering and sometimes fearful, just as reality may be scary. Light is not simply a stereotypical good, rather it is a complex consciousness, an awareness of the dark, and somehow, within that knowledge there lies hope. Baldwin's motif of light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" is about the sometimes painful nature of reality and the power gained from seeing it.
“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story in which the author presents a view on the realities of suffering in Harlem, New York in the 1950’s and how the presence of drugs can greatly impact not only the users, but the ones who care about the users as well. This can be shown through the literary use of setting, character, and theme. Throughout the story, the narrator struggles with trying to reason with the life his brother has chosen and the choices he has made. Sonny struggles to find an identity for himself having to live under the shadow of his brother his entire life. Sonny however finds solace in music which seems to become an escape for him and help him find meaning within himself. The narrator realizes at the end of the story why Sonny had chosen this life for himself.
Racism and the sense to fulfill a dream has been around throughout history. Langston Hughes’s poems “Harlem” and “I, Too” both depict the denial of ethnicity mix in society and its impact on an African American’s dream. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” uses jazz music to tie the belief of one’s intention and attainment to the black race. The two main characters are different in a way of one fitting into the norm of the American Dream and the other straying away from such to fulfill his own dream. All three pieces of writing occur during the same time in history in which they connect the black race with the rejection of the American Dream and the opportunity to obtain an individual effort by a culture.
Mid 20th century Harlem, it can be a depressing place for African Americans and their communities. In "Sonny's Blues" we learn about how the Narrator and his brother Sonny go through a tough time together in Harlem and how the blues gets them through the pain that occurred in Harlem at this time. Throughout the story there are four reoccurring themes, Suffering, Imprisonment, Redemption, and the blues. The themes play an interesting role into shaping the characters and reveal the authors intentions of the story.
Because of the thirst of superiority whites had, they wanted to restructure the behaviors of blacks in ways that would make them behave inferior. This was aided by the Jim Crow Laws enacted during the Jim Crow period. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” in Uncle Tom’s Children explains how the natural behaviors of blacks were affected by Jim Crow laws. Wright explains how these laws affected him personally. Right from his childhood, blacks have been restricted from having anything to do with whites. Black children were brought up in ways that would make them scared of the whites. This continued even in his adulthood. Only few blacks were fortunate to work in places where whites were, but they were always treated badly. Wright got a job in an optical company, where he worked alongside two whites, Mr. Morrie and Mr. Pease. When Wright asked both of his coworkers Mr. Morrie and Mr. Pease to tell him about the work, they turned against him. One day Mr. Morrie told Mr. Pease that Richard referred to him as "Pease," so they queried him. Because he was trapped between calling one white man a liar and having referred to the other without saying "Mr." Wright promised that he would leave the factory. They warned him, while he was leaving, that he should not tell the boss about it. Blacks were made to live and grow up under conditions that made them regard whites as superior. Whites also used blacks’ natural behaviors against them by sexually abusing them. It is natural for people to have sex, but if they forced or abused sexually this means that their natural behavior is being used against them because sexual abuse is not natural. Sarah, in “Long Black Song,” is an example of a black female that was sexually abused by whites. Sarah was married and had a child but when the white man came to her house he did not hesitate to have sex with her. She resisted him initially
In Wright’s short story “Long Black Song”, through his anger about white men, Silas reveals that the black woman is the source of African American difficulties. His anger for white men is triggered when he learns about Sarah’s interaction with the young white man selling clocks and gramophones. It escalates as he discovers that Sarah was raped by the white man. When the white man returns with his colleague for the gramophone, Silas whips and shoots at them. He wishes “all them white folks dead” (436). As he is expressing his hatred toward white men, his anger shifts to Sarah:
James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues tells the story of the narrator and his brother and the hardships that they must endure. As Kahlil Gibran States “Out of suffering have emerged the strangest souls, the most massive characters are seared with scars.” (Gibran). In that very quote the real light is shown as it informs the reader that with suffering comes growth and once the person whomever it may be emerges out of the darkness they may have scars but it has made them stronger. The theme of light and darkness as well as suffering play a vital part in this story. For both men there are times in which they have the blues and suffer in the darkness of their lives but music takes the suffering from them.
The story “Sonny’s Blues” By James Baldwin is about a jazz musician and his brother in 1950’s Harlem. The story centers on Sonny who uses jazz music as an escape from his depression. James Baldwin captures the art of jazz during this time period. The themes in this short story are perhaps varied, but all of them revolve around some form of suffering. One theme shows how music can promote change and understanding within relationships. A second theme reveals suffering caused by guilt. Yet another theme references the results of suffering brought about by searching for ones’ identity and how that leads to misunderstanding. There are also subthemes concerning racism and poverty.
The poem “Negro” was written by Langston Hughes in 1958 where it was a time of African American development and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Langston Hughes, as a first person narrator tells a story of what he has been through as a Negro, and the life he is proud to have had. He expresses his emotional experiences and makes the reader think about what exactly it was like to live his life during this time. By using specific words, this allows the reader to envision the different situations he has been put through. Starting off the poem with the statement “I am a Negro:” lets people know who he is, Hughes continues by saying, “ Black as the night is black, /Black like the depths of my Africa.” He identifies Africa as being his and is proud to be as dark as night, and as black as the depths of the heart of his country. Being proud of him self, heritage and culture is clearly shown in this first stanza.
“Sonny’s Blues” revolves around the narrator as he learns who his drug-hooked, piano-playing baby brother, Sonny, really is. The author, James Baldwin, paints views on racism, misery and art and suffering in this story. His written canvas portrays a dark and continual scene pertaining to each topic. As the story unfolds, similarities in each generation can be observed. The two African American brothers share a life similar to that of their father and his brother. The father’s brother had a thirst for music, and they both travelled the treacherous road of night clubs, drinking and partying before his brother was hit and killed by a car full of white boys. Plagued, the father carried this pain of the loss of his brother and bitterness towards the whites to his grave. “Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother.”(346) Watching the same problems transcend onto the narrator’s baby brother, Sonny, the reader feels his despair when he tries to relate the same scenarios his father had, to his brother. “All that hatred down there”, he said “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”(355) He’s trying to relate to his brother that even though some try to cover their misery with doing what others deem as “right,” others just cover it with a different mask. “But nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(355) The narrator had dealt with his own miseries of knowing his father’s plight, his Brother Sonny’s imprisonment and the loss of his own child. Sonny tried to give an understanding of what music was for him throughout thei...
When the piece was originally written for the Hot Chocolates, it was considered to be “America’s first `racial protest song`… [and] certainly Razaf’s lyric stripped bare essences of racial discontent that had very rarely if ever been addressed by any African American musically” (Singer 219). The music was created to express the hardships of the black community and the intra-racial discrimination, evident by the line: Browns and yellers all have fellers, gentlemen prefer them right. This illustrates that within the black community, those of fairer complexion were preferred. In Armstrong’s performance, the piece was removed from its original context of a Broadway show and placed as a stand-alone piece. In doing this, the emotion created by the Broadway performance and the stage scene were lost and “Black and Blue” became just another bluesy piece. Further, his “recitativo vocal style underscore[d] the song’s plaintive quality, while his exuberant embellished trumpet solos at the beginning and the end … counteract[ed] despair” (Meckna 38). However, Armstrong dropped the verse about intra-racial prejudice and made the chorus a “threnody for blacks of every shade” (Teachout 139). In doing this, he altered the music from being just about intra-racial issues to a global of scale of the battle between black and whites and the prejudices.
“Black Like Me” written by John Howard Griffin is an excellently written novel, based on factual events experienced by the author himself. It is based in the 1950s, a time when racism was widespread throughout America. The basic outline of the story is the following of one man (Griffin) as he embarks on a journey that takes him to the ‘other side’. Griffin is a middle-aged white man, and decides to personally experience the life of a Negro. He achieves this by literally changing the pigmentation in his skin so that he is no longer white. Griffin moves to the deep southern states of America where he is subject to harsh racist treatment by the whites. By doing so, he experiences first hand the reality of racism and prejudice, almost to the point of disbelief. The story focuses on the lives of Negroes: restricted, brutal and harsh. “My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without whi...
To begin with, Hughes uses nature to demonstrate a distinct relationship amongst blacks and whites. His use of snow and night convey a point simple enough, but through the use of these metaphors, he enables the story to be less invasive and more appealing to everyone that experiences "On the Road". Hughes' main character, Sargeant, is left doubting the goodness of life. "Sargeant didn't see the snow, not even under the bright lights of the main street, falling white and flaky against the night. He was too hungry, too sleepy, too tired" (Hughes 1). For almost two hundred years white people have suppressed the black population. Hughes' use of snow and night give us perfect example. Sargeant was tired of fighting, tired of surviving, tired of hoping, and most of all tired of the white people who've suppressed and tormented his life.